[dspillett]

> I'd like all articles to carry an obvious date of publishing and/or last update

Definitely, though as others in the comments have suggested, it may be that Google downranks pages like this. Not that I care much for my search ranking.

I've heard the same but I've not seen trustworthy documentation stating that is an issue. It might be plausible that a date older than a certain point will make something be considered out of date, or more so than an article with a newer date, but if you think about it deeper it could be a bad indicator. How do you compare to articles without dates? I'd argue a dated article is better all else being equal, because the extra context makes it potentially more informative, some information doesn't date badly (at least not quickly), and how would the algorithms know what to do with pages containing multiple dates?